During the past five years, the use of web portals, which comprise pages or groups of pages that allow a user to access a large number of centrally accessible applications and content have become widespread. Web portals enable a content provider to deliver large amounts of content and applications that are configured for easy access and can be organized as per an individual user's preferences.
One of the more important challenges facing the developers of web portal products is the development of tools that provide easier approaches to designing and organizing web portal content. Particularly, there has been an interest in tools and forms of organization that enable sections of a portal to be developed independently, while still maintaining varying degrees of uniformity in style and presentation.
One response has been the development of tools such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which enable configuration of style properties for varying levels of a portal hierarchy. These documents can each be associated with different levels of a portal hierarchy (e.g. portal, book, page) and provide information on how text, graphics, borders, page structures, etc. are processed and interpreted.
However, the tools available for interpreting and editing these hierarchical documents are very limited. Designers and administrators must often edit the text of these files directly. Additionally, the task of determining which hierarchical files affect a document can involve searching through multiple configurations. What is needed is an improved system for accessing and editing style documents that affect a presentation of a web portal.